Articles, interesting facts, insights, etc., from others in the translation and language world

“Today, language teaching developer Rosetta Stone is taking the next step forward by adding augmented reality and machine learning to its iPhone app, enabling users to identify and translate the names of real-world objects…”

It turns out that neural machine translation (NMT) like Google Translate may be reinforcing gender bias stereotypes. They’re working on it.

“Google Translate had previously offered one translation for queries, which reflected the gender bias of the underlying training data. Translations would generally skew toward masculine pronouns for words like “strong” or “doctor” and feminine ones for “beautiful” and “nurse.””

In an interview, Bill and Melinda Gates make their case for why a globalism is actually in the country’s interest, across the board:

“Melinda: Certainly the proposal that came out from the administration on the first round of the budget was disappointing to us, incredibly disappointing. But the good news is that Congress actually disposes the money, and Congress knows the importance of foreign aid.

It’s less than 1% of the U.S. government budget, but if you invest in people around the world you will get peace and prosperity and you won’t get ebola and disease crossing the borders.” (emphasis mine)